bangstrom

It is a description of a "quantum jump" but they also said the two electrons later become entangled. In my quote, they used the term,”...a retarded-advanced exchange of 4-vector potentials ” to describe entanglement. Entanglement is a 4-vector event with three space-like vectors and a time-like vector extending both forward and backward in time. (advanced and retarded waves) This was my quote, “As illustrated schematically in Figure 1, the process described involves the initial existence in each atom of a very small admixture of the wave function for the opposite state, thereby forming two-component states in both atoms. This causes them to become weak dipole radiators oscillating at the same difference-frequency ω0. The interaction that follows, characterized by a retarded-advanced exchange of 4-vector potentials, leads to an exponential build-up of a transaction, resulting in the complete transfer of one photon worth of energy ̄hω0 from one atom to the other. This process is described in more detail below” The last sentence is where they describe an entanglement.

The problem remains. When you measure the speed of light in units of length based on how far light travels in a given time and in units of time determined by the number of wavelengths of a cesium emission (or pick another emission) within your previously determined length, the value you get when you try to measure the speed of light will be the same as the value for c that you used in determining your values for length and time. Our units of distance, time, and c are all mutually determined. This is difficult to understand when measuring the speed of light over short distances but it becomes more clear when you consider the difficulty of measuring the speed of c over the distance of a lightyear. Light travels the distance of a light year in a year at the rate of c. So the rate of c can only be measured as the same as the value of c you used for calculating units of distance and time. This makes it impossible to measure c as anything other than it was decided to be by convention. You are describing the classical view which is not entanglement. There is no time interval to insert a block or a double slit between an entangled event. Entanglement is not possible unless the space between is open so a block would prevent entanglement in the first place. Entanglement is a violation of causality therefore also a violation of the EPR effect. It is described as a "violation of normal realism" but that is essentially causality to me. Entanglement is a correlation, but when the correlation is observed to have 'swapped' quantum locations in the before and after entanglement, that indicates an interaction. We can never observe the events as instant. Cramer and Mead describe them as simultaneous. As follows from SR, any two simultaneous events separated by distance will always be observed to also be separated by an interval of time at the rate of one second for every 300,000 km of distance. This makes c a spacetime dimensional constant rather than a speed of any kind. Einstein's Second Postulate was a provisional statement that was instrumental in his formulation of SR but whether we call c a speed or a dimensional constant makes no difference to the body of SR since the numerical value remains the same no matter what we call it. The "ground" state is the ambient energy level of the electron's environment. It is not an absolute zero.

As I said earlier, it is my understanding that ‘no-communication’ applies only to classical communication . Communication via entanglement can be observed when the particle coordination is reversed from its original condition indicating that ‘something has happened’ before and after entanglement. This is observed as quantum swapping. Entanglement can be used to communicate but it is impossible to observe such a communication as faster than light. Coordination occurs both with and without communication . The two are not mutually exclusive. Non-local interaction is the simplest form of interaction. Occam’s razor is violated when we insert what Mach called “unobserved metaphysicals” to explain events. Milo Wolff “When an energy exchange occurs between, say, two molecules one wonders what is traveling between them. If we don’t know, we say it is a “photon” Giving it a name doesn’t add any knowledge, but it allows us to feel better and we can pretend we know what travels.”

This indicates a misunderstanding of not only how particles become entangled, but also why particles become entangled. Neutrinos are unique animals, in the particle world. Have you ever heard of entangled neutrinos?

My statement was about the discrete nature of light with no mention of entanglement. Entanglement comes into play when one electron establishes a remote, nonlocal resonant connection with another electron possibly located far away. They become spontaneously entangled. One electron has an energy level above its ground state and the other electron has an energy level below its ground state. Conditions permitting, the high energy electron drops to a lower energy orbital while simultaneously the other rises to a higher energy level and both energy levels move towards a more equivalent state. One electron goes up in its individual atom as the other electron goes down with no need for energy to physically travel through the space between. Energy is conserved and no energy is lost to the void while waiting for a place to land. “As illustrated schematically in Figure 1, the process described involves the initial existence in each atom of a very small admixture of the wave function for the opposite state, thereby forming two-component states in both atoms. This causes them to become weak dipole radiators oscillating at the same difference-frequency ω0. The interaction that follows, characterized by a retarded-advanced exchange of 4-vector potentials, leads to an exponential build-up of a transaction, resulting in the complete transfer of one photon worth of energy ̄hω0from one atom to the other. This process is described in more detail below” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.11365 Article: Symmetry, Transactions, and the Mechanism of WaveFunction Collapse page 4

The translator was commenting about Tetrode's use of the words "massive particle" in other parts of the article. Tetrode wrote more than what I quoted. As I said earlier, the confusion was with my faulty memory. The electromagnetic part exists only at the extreme ends. The signal and sink. There is no "in between" an entanglement since it is nonlocal. A block between either particle would prevent entanglement in the first place so an entanglement can't be blocked. If neutrinos could be entangled, how could you tell? How is there nothing about entanglement here? Light energy is lost and gained in discrete amounts limited by the energy differentials between electron orbits within the atoms. This is why atoms can only gain or emit energy in discrete amounts. There is no need for a particle exchange to make the amounts discrete.

I don’t agree the Tetrode quote is not about but I am reading the quote from the perspective of having read the entire article and not just a short quote. Here is another quote from the same article, “Thus purely on the basis of logic, there can be, in my view, no objection to this new formulation. It is actually no more than an extention of classical dynamics to relativistic interactions of point masses, as made necessary by Lorentz transformations. Moreover, there seems to be no contrary empirical evidence, at least so far as this initial analysis indicates. When solar radiation is emitted and then eight minutes later absorbed on Earth, in the intervening time interval, according to classical physics, it is to be found each moment at a distinct location as a field energy. This new theory, however, does not recognize fields, in its terms in the interval the energy is nonexistent, although it will reappear at the moment of absorption. This leads to no observable differences.” Hugo Tetrode I understand this last sentence to mean that light energy at the signal disappears and instantly reappears upon absorption at another location without passing through the space between. This sounds like entanglement to me. The time interval we observe between signal and sink can be accounted for by Special Relativity where we observe a time delay of one second for every 300,000 km of separation.

If you go back in the thread you will find that I corrected my statement about Kracklauer claiming electrons were unknown in Tetrode's time. This was wrong and I posted what Kracklauer actually said, "Translater's note; At the time of writing, 'electron' appears to have been virtually a synonym for 'charged massive particle.' So why isn't what blocked? I don't recall ever seeing anything about entangled neutrinos. The Cramer-Mead paper is all about entanglement as is the Freedman-Clauser experiment. I don't see the mismatch.

Electromagnetic. Which paper is this?

I failed to mention that, in TIQM, the mechanism for energy exchange is quantum swapping. The conventional view of quantum swapping is limited to quantum properties not observable on a large scale while TIQM includes the relative energy levels among bound electrons as separate quantum states that can be swapped in the before-and-after of entanglement. A description of how quantum states swap energy levels among electrons is no different from how they swap things like spin with the exception that a trans location of energy levels is observable while the former is not. Entanglement is not without communication and the item communicated is called ‘information.’ The thing violated by entanglement is usually called “normal realism” but that may be just a euphemism for causality. My understanding is that the violation of Bell’s inequality and the EPR effect demonstrated a violation of normal realism. Entanglement was a newly observed phenomenon not a “new property” in Occam’s sense as something made up ad hoc to explain the results. A simple explanation for how a particle decides was explained by Tetrode and it has changed little since his time.. “Suppose two atoms in different states of excitation are located near each other, normally it is to be expected that they would have little influence on each other; however, under special conditions with respect to positions and velocities, possibly also in the vicinity of a third atom, it might be that strong interactions occur, Such a situation could well lead to an energy transfer between atoms such that their excited states are exchanged. The energy loss of one and the gain of the other could occur in a time interval corresponding to their separation; that is, we would have an instance of emission from one atom and absorption by the other.” Hugo Tetrode Two or more separate particles, possibly greatly separated, act and interact as if they were side-by-side. I consider entanglement to be a non-local, causality-violating, interaction. The old ‘Spooky action at a distance.’ This may be a topic for further investigation.

"Undefined works for me." However, there are many attempts to define the undefinable. I forgot to mention the Cramer-Mead article I cited above can be found at,https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11365 Symmetry, Transactions, and the Mechanism of Wave Function Collapse Their model for the transmission of radiant energy does not include the involvement of a photon particle traveling through space from one electron to another carrying a quantum of energy. There is no passing through space in a measurable time. Our observations of the time it takes light to get from one electron to another always includes a relativistic amount of time at the constant rate of c. As I recall, Ruth Kastner called the passage of light from one atom to another as being beyond our concept of time. Here is another of her descriptions of the time of a signal from source to sink taken from same from my previously cited Cramer-Mead article. “that multi-body quantum systems with separated components that are subject to conservation laws exhibit a property called “quantum entanglement” [12]: Their component wave functions are inextricably locked together, and they display a nonlocal correlated behavior enforced over an arbitrary interval of space-time without any hint of an underlying mechanism or any show of respect for our cherished classical “arrow of time.” Entanglement is the most mysterious of the many so-called “quantum mysteries.”It has thus become clear that the quantum transfer of energy must have quite a different symmetry from that implied by this simple “photon-as-particle” interpretation. Within the framework of statistical QM, the intrinsic symmetry of the energy transfer and the mechanisms behind wave function collapse and entanglement have been greatly clarified by the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics(TI), developed over several decades by one of us and recently described in some detail in the bookThe Quantum Handshake[12]. [We note that Ruth Kastner has extended her “probabilist” variant of the TI, which embraces the Heisenberg/probability view and characterizes transactions as events in many-dimensional Hilbert space, into the quantum-relativistic domain [13,14] and has used it to extend and enhance the “decoherence” approach to quantum interpretation [15]]

I said it would be absurd to try to measure the speed of light over the distance of a light-year, or any tiny fraction of that distance. This was hardly a demand. I also said the units of measurement don't matter. The point I was trying to make was that our units of distance, time. and the value of c are all mutually defined so that any attempt to measure c in the same units in which they are defined will only yield the values that were put into it. If you were to guess how far light can travel the distance of a light year over the time of a year, what would it be? Do you get it yet?

Could you explain the connection between HUP and superposition. They appear to be uncertainties about two different things. Ignore this, I see you already have. "In what follows we put forth a simple approach to describing the individual system (and its development in time),which Einstein believed was missing from statistical quantum theory and which must be present before any theory of physics could be considered to be complete. The way forward was suggested by the phenomenon of entanglement. Over the past few decades,many increasingly exquisite Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen [2] (EPR) experiments [3–11] have demonstrated that multi-body quantum systems with separated components that are subject to conservation laws exhibit a property called “quantum entanglement” [12]: Their component wave functions are inextricably locked together, and they display a nonlocal correlated behavior enforced over an arbitrary interval of space-time without any hint of an underlying mechanism or any show of respect for our cherished classical “arrow of time.” Entanglement is the most mysterious of the many so-called “quantum mysteries.”It has thus become clear that the quantum transfer of energy must have quite a different symmetry from that implied by this simple “photon-as-particle” interpretation. Within the framework of statistical QM, the intrinsic symmetry of the energy transfer and the mechanisms behind wave function collapse and entanglement have been greatly clarified by the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics(TI), developed over several decades by one of us and recently described in some detail in the book The Quantum Handshake[12]. [We note that Ruth Kastner has extended her “probabilist” variant of the TI, which embraces the Heisenberg/probability view and characterizes transactions as events in many-dimensional Hilbert space, into the quantum-relativistic domain [13,14] and has used it to extend This paper begins with a tutorial review of the TI approach to a credible photon mechanism developed in the book Collective Electrodynamics[16], followed by a deeper dive into the electrodynamics of the quantum handshake, and finally includes descriptions of several historic experiments that have excluded entire classes of theories. We conclude that the approach described here has not been excluded by any experiment to date." John Cramer and Carver Mead This quote is too concise to clearly explain quantum entanglement violates causality or how the “photon-as-a particle” fails as a physical interaction while nonlocal entanglement secedes. These are dealt with the body of the text. In this thread, many of my comments have been elaborations on these topics. I have always considered entanglement to be a nonlocal interaction in violation of causality. "Spooky action at a distance."

I have no doubt you know better than me. Would that make it a straight line on the X axis?

I get an arctanh of zero. A wavelength of zero. Essentially a straight line on the time axis going nowhere. If correct, this raises some interesting interpretations about light. I have a philosophical concern about the idea of superposition but I can’t say it ain’t so. Their not knowing anything about the measurement of the first particle can occasionally be demonstrated in the autopsy of the event by the observation that one of their quantum states has quantum swapped with its entangled partner. This possibility is suggested by violations of the Bell test. It is my understanding that the no-communication theorem bears the caviat that it is limited to “classical” information. “Quantum entanglement refers to the phenomenon where particles share a quantum state, such that the measurement of one particle instantaneously affects the other, regardless of the distance between them. However, the no-communication theorem stipulates that these effects cannot carry classical information.” -Wikipedia- No-communication theorem Superpositions and violations of causality are not 'logical' from the classical point of view. I would replace the word logical with non-local to satisfy the contrarians.

I am well aware of the contradiction. You say the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second without even testing it and I actuality test it in the best vacuum achievable and the best state-of-the-art equipment money can buy and find it to be 299,792,500 meters per second, whose value are you going to use for your calculation? The value for c, right or wrong, is decided by convention so everyone uses the same numerical value. This is why it would be absurd to measure the speed of light based on units of distance and time whose calculations themselves are based on the conventionally established speed of light. If you want to measure the speed of light over the distance of a light year, you would have to first see how far light travels in a year and then see how far light travels in a year again. The second effort would be redundant. And if the second measurement is different from the first you don't know where the error could be without a lot of retesting.

Einstein had serious doubts about entanglement, as he explained in the EPR article, and he derisively called it “Spukhafte Fernwirkung.” This matters because others in the physics community found ‘Spooky action at a distance’ to be a useful and concise description of what entanglement is and the name stuck. The same happened with Fred Hoyle and his derisive use of the term "Big Bang." You are right with the “if’ but, in reality, this happens in reverse. Our measurements of the length of a meter and the duration of a second do change from one inertial reference frame to another. This is why c is a constant in all reference frames. John Cramer and Carver Mead's model, TIQM has been tested many times over. Often without the awareness of the experimenters as they were testing quantum, phenomeon and observing effects that defied explanation by conventional photon particle theories but were easily explained by TIQM. In Special Relativity, time slows to a stop and lengths contract to zero at the 'speed' of light. This is the reference frame of light.

I can agree with about 98 percent of what you have posted and I think our differences can be reduced to a few simple points. I don't think so. I know units are convertible. I don’t understand why neither you nor “swansont” don’t see a problem with why we can’t measure the speed of light in meters per second and call it a speed as in a velocity. Or am I wrong about this either being your views or it being a problem.? This may seem silly but I think it involves some fundamental issues. I first stated the problem as, “Consider the absurdity of measuring the speed of light over the distance of a light year.” I can make the problem more practical by suggesting that someone in Paris measure the platinum-iridium bar, once our standard length of a meter, with a meter stick only to find that the meter bar is now 98cm. long. How did the platinum bar shrink 2cm. since 1968 or is the meter stick too long because it was made in the USA? The problem is that you can’t measure your standard for measurement and expect it to be anything other than what it was defined to be. Many people have measured c over distances of meters and seconds and found different different values but the absolute value for c was established by convention. It is a ratio of distance over time expressed in the same units used to measure velocities but it is not a velocity. It is a defined ratio. In Cramer's TIQM and similar models, it is an information exchange. An electron in one atom is allowed, by its nonlocal resonance with an electron in a remote atom, to drop to a lower energy orbit while simultaneously an electron in its entangled partner atom rises to a higher energy orbit. Energy disappears from one atom and remotely appears in another atom without passing through the space between. One electron goes down while the other goes up. Nothing passes through the space between but information. This is a stronger correlation than can be classically explained. It is dismissive but I assume you know what a dimension is. Something like space or time. And, I assume you know what a constant is. Something like the constant c. And, I suppose you have heard of spacetime before. So I just assumed you would know what I meant when I called c a spacetime dimensional constant. I said it was self-descriptive implying that it did not require an elaborate explanation. Just reading the words should suffice. Yours is the kind of elaborate explanation I was trying to avoid. Yes, I did mention the ratio of distance to time and fractions there of, many times. I simply said I did not mention the inverse of LT.

A dimensional constant is largely self-explanatory. I don't recall mentioning anything about the inverse of LT. I am guessing L is length and T is time. Could you explain? Measuring the speed of light over the distance of a lightyear is absurd. Suppose you find, after a year, that light travels more or less than a light year. Think about it. If entanglement is not an action at a distance, then what is it? I am aware of different definitions but they all boil down to what Einstein called, “Spukhafte Fernwirkung” Spooky actions at a distance. The value of c, as defined by convention, is now used is used to define both meters and seconds so we can not measure the speed of light in meters and seconds and expect it to be anything other than c. Imagine the absurdity of measuring the length of the platinum-iridium bar kept in Paris in meters or microns when that was our standard for a meter. Or the length of a tropical year in seconds defined as a fraction of a tropical year. Do you see the problem yet? The entire phenomenon could occur as a function of electron events. An electron could transfer a part of its energy to another electron, not through a trajectory in spacetime, but as two coordinated, simultaneous events. Light does not experience time so, for light, emission and absorption are simultaneous. We can never observe simultaneous events as simultaneous when they are separated by distance which always includes a relativistic interval of time at the rate of one second for every 300,000 km of space. The difference in this from the classical model comes with eliminating the concept of light as a discrete particle carrying energy through space. In other words, light does not exist between events, but only at the events

No, the speed of a computer and the speed of light are measured much the same. The speed of a computer is in cycles per second. Seconds are defined as the duration of time in a given number of cycles (aka transitions) emitted by a cesium atom and meters are defined as the distance light travels in 1/c seconds. Seconds, meters, and c are all mutually defined with c having a value defined by convention. It is redundant to try to measure c expecting to find it anything other than c because the value of c was a part of the calculations for deriving seconds and meters and a calculation can only yield the same value for c that was put into it. The speed of light can not be measured in m/s because that is essentially the same as trying to measure the speed of light over the distance of a light year. C is a ratio and not a speed. This should be your clue that c is a dimensional constant and not a speed. It may have the dimensions of time over distance but not all dimensions of time over distance are necessarily speeds. This one is a ratio.

I don't find it puzzling that c is the same for all observers either. I only find it strange to think of c as the velocity of something traveling through space. Consider the absurdity of trying to measure the speed of light over the distance of a light year. Any attempt to measure the speed of light in time over distance is just a scaled-down version of the same impossibility since our units of distance, time, and c are all mutually defined. Given any two values, we can calculate the third. This is why c is the same for all observers and speeds are not intrinsic in their frames. The value of c is a universally observed ratio of distance over time and it has all the properties of a spacetime dimensional constant and none of the properties of a ‘speed’ as a velocity. If we consider c as a dimensional constant rather than as a velocity-speed, this simplifies our understanding of SR where c is simply a conversion factor for converting between units of distance and time. And the paradoxes of c as a speed disappear. The ‘pole and barn,’ for example. I agree that entanglement in covalent bonds is a different matter and what is happening in such close quarters is too speculative for me. As for me, I am interested in discussing entanglement which is action at a distance, and how c is a dimensional constant rather than a velocity.

Yes, it has the dimensions of a speed in units of distance over time but not all dimensions of distance over time are necessary a speed. It is more like the speed of a computer than the speed of a ballistic object. What Olaf Roemer discovered in the seventeenth century with his observations of the planets around Jupiter was simply a constant relation between measures of observational distance and observational time in the constant ratio of units c. Logically, however, although c has the dimensions of speed, it need not be interpreted as a speed. The idea that light ‘travels’ in any sense is pure supposition. We never see light leave an object and ‘travel’ through the vacuum of space from one object to another. Also, the observation that the speed-of-light has to be the same for all observers in all inertial reference frames is puzzling and defies common sense. It makes no sense that one speed should be the same for all observers independent of their individual, speeds. Observers in different inertial reference frames measure distance and time appropriate to their local conditions but they all measure time as a constant ratio proportional to distance and falsely call it a speed. I have often heard of c described as the speed of causality and that sounds good to me. There must be a better term than “speed of causality." The rate of causality? The rate of correlation? Anyhow, it ain't a speed. I agree it's a correlation and I prefer to call it an “event” which doesn’t imply traveling through space. I prefer models where energy is lost from one location and simultaneously gained at another without traveling through the space between. This is what we observe as described in SR, with an interval of time that is always proportional to the distance between.

You are right, the electron was discovered long prior to 1922. I was relying on my faulty memory of a paper I haven’t reviewed in several years. Kracklauer’s actual quote was, “At the time of the writing, ‘electron’ appears to have been virtually a synonym for ‘charged massive particle.’ I was also wrong about the Journal volume of the source. The complete name of the source was “Uber den Wirksamzusamenmmenhang der Welt. Eine Erweiterung der Klassichen Dynamic. Z. Phys. 10, 317-328 (1922) Nonlocal action at a distance, aka entanglement, can be found in other parts of Tetrode’s article but, of course, not by the name 'entanglement.' “When solar radiations emitted and then eight minutes later absorbed on Earth, in the intervening time interval, according to classical physics, it is found each moment at a distinct location as field energy. This new theory, however, does not recognize fields, so in its terms in the interval the energy is nonexistent, although it will appear at the moment of absorption. This leads to no observable differences.”-Tetrode. In my previous quote, Tetrode explains the time interval we always observe in light-related events as “ A time interval corresponding to their separation.” This is consistent with Special Relativity where we always find light-related events separated by distance to also be separated by time at the constant ratio of one second for every 300,000 km of distance. This view considers the commonly called ‘speed of light’ to be a spacetime dimensional constant rather a speed of any kind. This is why we can't have c+/-v because c is a ratio of time/distance and not a speed. You can't go faster than a ratio anymore than you can't go faster than 1.6 km per mile. The numerical for c in Special Relativity is the same whether you call it a speed or a dimensional constant so there is no difference in the body of SR. The only difference is with Einstein's Second Postulate where c is considered a speed.

You were perfectly, clear that covalent bonds are an entanglement and I find the idea quite valid but it was just novel to me. It may prove to be important but as of now, I find it to be speculative but worthwhile to keep in mind among other possibilities. The idea of swapping states has been around for many years, even before what we normally think of as states were known. When I first learned of entanglement I thought such a bizarre phenomenon must be of some enormous importance but I had no idea what. Later I discovered the nonlocal, swapping of energy states among charged particles was a possible mechanism behind the transmission of light. The possibility was first proposed by Hugo Tetrode in “Zeitschrift fur Physik” vol.6 1922. Here is a quote from Tetrode’s article as translated by A. F. Kracklauer. Kracklauer advised the reader that Tetrode’s mention of atoms should best be understood as electrons. Electrons were unknown in Tetrode’s time. “Suppose two atoms in different states of excitation are located near each other, normally it is to be expected that they would have little influence on each other; however, under special conditions with respect to positions and velocities, possibly also in the vicinity of a third atom, it might be that strong interactions occur, Such a situation could well lead to an energy transfer between atoms such that their excited states are exchanged. The energy loss of one and the gain of the other could occur in a time interval corresponding to their separation; that is, we would have an instance of emission from one atom and absorption by the other. While according to classical understanding, emission is a random event leading to radiation that also randomly might somewhere at some time be adsorbed; here in this theory, the source and sink of a radiative interaction are virtually predetermined paired events. That is, in effect, the sun would not shine at all were there no other charged bodies in the universe to adsorb its radiation.”-Hugo Tetrode 1922 The model of swapping energy states among entangled particles is an important part of N.”Viv”Pope and Anthony Osborne’s “Angular Momentum Synthesis” POAMS and later in John Cramer’s “Transactional Interpretation Of Quantum Mechanics” TIQM. An excellent discussion of TIQM can be found in Chapter 5 of Carver Mead’s book “Collective Electrodynamics” and also in a 2020 collaborative article between Cramer and Mead. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.11365 Here is a quote from the article, “As illustrated schematically in Figure 1, the process described involves the initial existence in each atom of a very small admixture of the wave function for the opposite state, thereby forming two-component states in both atoms. This causes them to become weak dipole radiators oscillating at the same difference-frequency ω0. The interaction that follows, characterized by a retarded-advanced exchange of 4-vector potentials, leads to an exponential build-up of a transaction, resulting in the complete transfer of one photon worth of energy ̄hω0from one atom to the other. This process is described in more detail below”-Cramer and Mead 2020 Figure 1 and the quote can be found on p.4 of the article cited above. Cramer and Mead consider the energy states between entangled electrons to be oscillating rather than in superposition until the wavefunction collapses fixing the energy levels where they are found at the instant of collapse.

I have never thought of a covalent bond as an entanglement but I suspect you are right. As for the states before and after, if the electrons are in opposite states, as I understand from Cramer, Mead and Kastner, the electrons are rapidly swapping states as suggested by their sharing a common wavefunction rather than the more conventional view that they are in a state of superposition. I agree with “exchemist” that none of this is observable nor does it matter.